


feel🖖the red

by sonshineandshowers



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24427030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonshineandshowers/pseuds/sonshineandshowers
Summary: The voice demands, "Feel the red." Malcolm doesn't know how.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: Prodigal Whump Fic Exchange - Spring 2020





	feel🖖the red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissScorp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissScorp/gifts).



“Feel the red.”

Malcolm’s fingers grasped at the air, each one individually furling like talons around a fishy catch, but he found nothing. “I can’t — “

“Try harder,” the voice demanded. “ _Feel_ the red.”

He touched the soft jersey of his sweatpants, the long wooden stretch of his desk, the light sweat where his hand shook — _nothing_ felt red. “I don’t understand,” he admitted, a rattle in his voice mimicking his hand. “What does red even feel like?”

“You’re not trying hard enough,” the voice scolded.

He thought of plump strawberries that could grace his kitchen if he ever had the urge to fill it with life beyond Twizzlers, the ridges of the candy rolling back and forth in his fingers through the plastic wrapper. The velvety backing behind his weapons collection, cushioning every piece and protecting it from the world beyond the glass.

But none of those things felt red. They felt like strawberries, Twizzlers, velvet.

The voice persisted, yet he didn’t understand what he was being asked to do. “Feel the red,” the voice said, practically on repeat, a warped record spinning round and round with a wobbly message that didn’t make any sense.

His hands shook on either side of his head, stress giving him a full body tremor he couldn’t control as it rushed to seek any outlet. Pulling at his hair, considering he could rip it from his scalp to ease the demands on his body. Clawing at his face when it wasn’t sufficient, scratching grooves along his beard line as ceremonial tattoos.

“You’re _not_ doing it right,” the voice reprimanded, halting his quest for a hidden itch.

His mind toiled trying to figure out how he could possibly be feeling a color wrong if he couldn’t determine how to feel a color at all. Colors didn’t have feelings — they just were.

But they evoked plenty.

The cherry red of his father’s sweater his cheek snuggled into while reading a bedtime story of fantastical adventures. Dreaming of a life in the distant past while he drifted off to sleep, sheltered in the warmth of the man beside him.

Wine walls of a cell, cold concrete caging a serial killer. Hospital room. Cell. Hospital room. Dad. Serial killer. Dad.

The red line demarcating before death and after death, never the twain shall meet. His toes creeping right up to the edge, but never passing, the taste of a kill never quite one for his temperamental stomach.

A closet stuffed to the brim and buckling the hinges with feelings.

But he couldn’t put a finger on them and say they felt red.

“For someone as bright as you, you truly are dense,” the voice scoffed.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said in chagrin.

“Feel the red.”

“Ahhh!” he slammed his hands against his desk in frustration, not paying any mind to where his fists landed.

A red stream ran across the worktop, reaching for his forgotten tumbler. Tracing it back to its source, the tip of his letter opener impaled his hand between two of the digits. He pulled it out and watched the flow run around his pen and across his papers, crimson gleaming under the moonlight.

His finger skimmed across the surface, a warm refreshment in the summer months, not enough to cool, but not so hot as to make the sensation uncomfortable. Glided across the varnished wood, skating like water striders searching for their young nymphs to feast. Neared the precipice where his father’s dozen messages rested, encouraging him to try again, to —

“Feel the red,” the voice chanted, a scalpel dancing in his hands. Words as sharp as the blade that melted through skin and sluiced blood across her stomach.

Slippery along the main route, yet tacky near the banks that received the occasional splash. Rough where the stream rarely flowed, lost and lain out to dry.

To die.

Such a cut was lethal if unattended. She needed compression, sutures, all the things he’d learned from his father’s medical texts. The things he’d practiced on kits while others scrambled for the play set.

Moist fluid seeping between his fingers, creeping for memories he didn’t know whether happened or were fabricated on another sleepless night of terrors ripping through him. Tearing apart the few safe spaces he had, rummaging for any places he had hope of conquering the demons and flooding them until he was the one left drowning.

“Feel the red.”

It traced his lips, having forgotten blood on his hands.

“Feel the red.”

Its coppery taste turned his stomach, reminding him of being sick when he couldn’t watch his father’s destruction any longer.

“ _Feel the red_ ,” the conductor repeated, his hands shaking in harsh crescendo. “ _Feel_ it.”

He murmured, unable to do anything to block the onslaught of every red that had ever brushed his fingers. Every touch and stroke and tickle that ever kissed his skin. Every poke and prod that he begged to stop, yet words were never enough. Every graze and tap and diminishing head pat designed to silence him into submission.

“ _Come on_ , boy,” his father’s voice goaded.

His head whipped up from his desk and found his fingers resting in a puddle, his letter opener underneath his injured palm. Eyes blurring with the haze of a nightmare and days without restful sleep, it was difficult to tell whose blood he’d gone swimming in. Words echoed in his head, reminding him of an insistent demand.

“Feel the red.”

It was irritation ripped into his face, torturous memories gouged into his brain he could never get rid of. His father’s voice haunting him even in sleep, destroying any chance of rest. Longing for a man that was just dad and not… _him_.

He got up and clenched a paper towel in his fist, crudely stemming the flow. Brought another few back to his desk to clean up the mess. Took one last pointed stripe through it with his index finger.

Twenty-two years, and red didn’t feel any different.

* * *

_fin_


End file.
